Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 25, No. 7, July, 1980

Death of a Dream by James Holding

It began when Hilda inherited 1,000 shares of stock...

When Hilda inherited a thousand shares of Intercontinental stock from this great-uncle of hers, I knew that it was my big chance.

For I was sick of Hilda — deathly sick — after being married to her for seven years. I wanted to get away from her tiresome adoration of me, from her emptyheaded chatter, from the distasteful necessity of watching her grow ever fatter and dowdier.

I wanted desperately, too, to escape from my dull job in the bank, where I was stuck in a junior-executive rut that I knew would never lead to a future worthy of my capabilities.

You can see why I welcomed Hilda’s legacy.

Fortunately, Hilda was unbelievably naive about money matters, even though I worked in a bank. You’d have thought that a little money sense would have rubbed off on her just listening to my dinner table conversation for seven years. But no. Hilda remained wide-eyed and innocent about all things financial right up to the end. It wasn’t because she thought money slightly degrading, as many do. It was just because she was naturally stupid.

Her face and figure had been superb when I married her. That’s what had attracted me to her. But inside that pretty, boring little head of hers, I soon discovered, there wasn’t room for anything but a simple doglike devotion to me and a few very commonplace thoughts about clothes, movies, television programs, and country cooking. And her beautiful figure began to disappear under layers of fat within a year of our wedding.

Anyway, the day we received the stock certificate from the Chicago lawyers who were settling Hilda’s great-uncle’s estate, I dropped into Jamie’s Bar on the way home from the bank. When I got home, Hilda kissed me at the door.

“Why, you’ve been drinking, Chester,” she said.

“A quick one in Jamie’s Bar on my way home,” I said, “to celebrate your legacy.”

“Oh,” Hilda said with her noble, forgiving air, “that’s nice. Now come to dinner, dear. It’s ready. Ham and cabbage.”

You see? Ham and cabbage! When every nerve in my bored body was crying out for caviar, beef stroganoff, and champagne under a purple sky with a beautiful slender woman!

Dissembling, I said, “Oh, good! But let’s see that stock certificate you told me came in the mail today.”

She got an envelope off the TV cabinet for me.

“Here it is,” she said. “And goodness! Look at all the postage!”

“It’s registered mail, that’s why. And rightly so, Hilda. Do you realize this piece of paper is worth over a hundred thousand dollars?”

“Really?” Hilda said. “How nice! I think it was dear of Uncle Lew to leave it to me, don’t you?”

“Very generous and thoughtful, yes.” I opened the certificate, made out on its face to Mrs. Hilda Carstairs. “Of course, it’s a growth stock. Intercontinental doesn’t pay any dividends yet. But it’s nice to have it, certainly.” I pointed to the endorsement line on the back. “You’d better sign it right now, dear. Then everything will be legal and the transaction will be completed.”

“Sign it? Of course. I should have known. What for?” She took the fountain pen I handed her and signed her name on the back of the certificate.

“That’s your receipt signature,” I told her blandly. “The stock certificate isn’t good without your signature on the back. Once you’ve signed it, they know the stock really belongs to you.” I folded up the certificate and shoved it carelessly into my pocket.

“I’ll put it in our safe-deposit box at the bank,” I said.

She nodded without much interest.

“The ham and cabbage will be getting cold,” she said. “Let’s eat now, dear.”

Somehow the ham and cabbage tasted better that night than ever before.

I waited for several months, assuaging my natural impatience as best I could. Then, on my lunch hour one day, I got Hilda’s stock certificate out of my safe-deposit box and drove out to a suburban branch of The Farmer’s Bank, a competitor of my own bank. I happened to know one of the tellers there, a fellow named Hogarth. I’d sat beside him at a Bankers’ Association dinner one time, and we’d been speaking acquaintances ever since.

I went directly to the branch manager’s desk and introduced myself. Then I said matter-of-factly, “I’d like to borrow seventy thousand dollars, Mr. Norbit,” reading his name off the plate on his desk.

He raised his eyebrows, exactly as a banker is commonly supposed to do on hearing such words.

“That’s quite a big loan, Mr. Carstairs,” he said noncommittally. He looked at me, sensibly awaiting further information.

“I’m conscious of that. I’m prepared to put up excellent collateral, however. One thousand shares of Intercontinental. I have it right here.”

Mr. Norbit’s face cleared immediately. His sharp eyes followed my hand into my jacket pocket. When it came out holding Hilda’s stock certificate, he said expansively, “Ah, that’s a very sound company, Mr. Carstairs. A very sound security. But apt to be volatile, you know.”

He opened a copy of the Wall Street Journal on his desk and took a quick look at yesterday’s closing prices.

“Closed at 104 last night,” he murmured. “I’m afraid, though, we can’t let you have seventy thousand on it, Mr. Carstairs. The market is currently rather unsettled. And the stock is volatile, subject to big swings. We have to be well covered on a loan of this size, you know.”

“I understand it,” I said. “I’m a banker myself.”

“Really?” He was surprised.

“Yes. I’m applying to you for the loan instead of my own bank because I don’t want everybody at my place to know my personal business.”

“Wait a minute.” Norbit picked up his telephone and called his headquarters office. “What’s the limit I can lend on a thousand shares of Intercontinental?” he asked somebody there. The home-office man said something and Norbit hung up. He said to me, “We can’t let you have more than sixty-five.”

I said, deadpan, “That’ll have to do, then.” It was more than I’d hoped. “I’m in a hurry for the money. I’ve got this very promising investment opportunity in a new business—” I told him about it in detail.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll have the note drawn up. Six percent all right?”

“Sure. And ninety days.”

He nodded and held out his hand for the stock certificate. I gave it to him. He turned it over, saw that Hilda had signed it, but looked doubtful. “I’m sure you’ll understand,” he said then, “but on a loan of this size, we have to be very careful. Is this Hilda Carstairs, to whom the stock is registered, your wife?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s willing to pledge her stock for this loan?”

“She endorsed the certificate, didn’t she? It’s negotiable.”

“True. But we can’t be sure she endorsed it willingly, can we?”

I pretended indignation. “You know I’m Chester Carstairs.”

“Not for sure,” he interrupted apologetically.

“Call your teller, Mr. Hogarth. He knows me. He knows I’m married too.”

Mr. Norbit, without embarrassment, did exactly that. Hogarth identified me at once and vouched for me.

After all, a member of the Bankers’ Association—

When Hogarth left, I said to Norbit, “You want me to get Hilda to sign a specific permission form for you?”

I was still pretending hurt at his lack of confidence in me. But I could have got Hilda to sign one if he’d wanted it. She wouldn’t know it from a laundry receipt.

“That won’t be necessary,” he said with dignity. “How do you want the money?”

“I’ll open a checking account with you, and you can pay the sixty-five thousand into it. O.K.?”

“Good. Then we’ll just charge your account with the monthly interest on the loan.”

And so it was arranged. I signed the note for the loan, left Hilda’s stock certificate with Norbit, and opened a new account with the Farmer’s Bank, into which the sixty-five thousand was to be paid next day.

A week later, I went down into the safe deposit vault in my own bank on my lunch hour. I signed the admission card, gave my box key to Charlie, the custodian, and went with him to my box location. While he was withdrawing my box from the metallic ranks of others in section C, I ostentatiously lighted a cigarette and said, “I guess I’ll use a booth this time, Charlie. I’ve got to go through my box.”

“O.K., Mr. Carstairs,” said Charlie. “How about booth four here?”

“Swell,” I said, blowing cigarette smoke. I entered the booth with my safety deposit box. “Thanks, Charlie.” He closed the door of the booth behind me and left me to myself.

I put my cigarette down on the edge of the booth table, flipped both ends of my deposit box open and rummaged its entire contents out on the table top. There was nothing of much importance there. I had no stocks or bonds, no cash stashed away. There was the house lease, a small insurance policy (lapsed), birth certificates for Hilda and me, the passports we’d used on our Caribbean honeymoon (expired), a silver medal I’d won in the high jump at a high school track meet, and a ragged bundle of old income-tax records that went back to our first joint return.

I set the bundle of income-tax records near the edge of the table, right up against the end of my neglected cigarette. Then I patiently blew on the cigarette coal until the papers caught a spark from it, glowed briefly, then emitted a tongue of flame. I let the income-tax papers get well alight, fanning smoke over the booth’s half door into the vault outside.

I dumped my other papers on top of the burning tax records, waiting until they were flaming merrily, then cursed at the top of my voice and yelled, “Charlie! Hey, Charlie! Fire!” I began beating at the burning papers with my hands.

Charlie had seen the smoke because, just as I yelled, he arrived with a small fire-extinguisher. I had the fire out by then, and was regarding the charred remains of my valuable papers with dismay when he pulled the half door open.

“What happened?” he asked in a flustered voice.

“Cigarette caught the stuff on fire.” A rueful glance at my slightly burned hands seemed indicated here.

“That’s tough,” Charlie said. “But I’m glad you weren’t burned seriously, Mr. Carstairs.” He took in the charred papers. “Did anything valuable burn up?”

“Nothing I can’t replace. Nothing even very important, except for a stock certificate that belongs to my wife. It serves me right for being careless. I’m glad I didn’t set the bank on fire. Whew! I was scared there for a minute!”

“Me too,” agreed Charlie with emphasis.

That night, between reluctant mouthfuls of Hilda’s macaroni casserole, I told her about my accidental fire.

“Oh, Chester darling!” she cried with characteristic disregard of the really important issue. “You might have been badly burned!”

“True,” I said, “but I wasn’t. A couple of little blisters. What did get burned up was that stock your uncle left you.”

“That’s too bad,” said Hilda, clicking her tongue. “But we can get along without it all right. We did before.”

I broke the news to her. “We didn’t actually lose the money, of course. We can get a new stock certificate to replace the burned one, Hilda. There’ll be a lot of red tape to go through, that’s all.”

“What will we have to do?”

“You’ll have to write Intercontinental and tell them your certificate has been destroyed by fire and you want a new one. They’ll send you a form to fill out, applying for an indemnity bond. You submit the form, with a statement of the facts as to how the original certificate was destroyed, to a surety company. For a price, the surety company will issue you a bond of indemnity covering the face amount of your original stock certificate. Then you’ll get a new stock certificate to replace the old one.”

“Goodness!” Hilda said, bewildered. “What’s a bond of indemnity?”

See what I mean about Hilda? A complete blank about money matters.

In the following weeks, however, she went through all the red tape I’d described, and finally was qualified to be issued a new certificate for her thousand shares of Intercontinental. I had to guide her every step of the way, of course. Luckily, she was very incurious about the whole thing.

She never even questioned where I’d found the six-thousand-dollar premium to pay for her bond of indemnity. Actually it was the first check I’d drawn on my new sixty-five-thousand-dollar account at the Farmers’ Bank.

Well, when Hilda’s new stock certificate arrived I pulled my fountain pen out of my pocket once more and said, “Has to be signed, Hilda. Remember?”

“Oh, yes. My receipt signature. Isn’t that what you said?” She scrawled her name carelessly on the endorsement line.

The next morning, as soon as the market opened, I sold Hilda’s thousand shares of Intercontinental through the brokerage office in my own bank building where I was known, turning over her new certificate to the broker. The stock brought 105 dollars a share. This, less brokerage fees and commissions, meant a net profit to me of over a hundred thousand dollars. I told the broker to deliver his check for the amount to me at my office.

I got the check on Monday morning, April second. I remember the date very well. I used my lunch hour to drive out to the Farmer’s Bank branch where I had my new account. I told Mr. Norbit, the manager, that I was going to deposit my broker’s check in my account there, that I had liquidated some other holdings of mine in order to add to my capital for the investment venture I’d described to him.

“What I’d like is a cashier’s check for the whole thing, Mr. Norbit — this hundred thousand and the total of my account here — as evidence of absolutely certified funds to use as a bargaining factor in my negotiations with my future colleagues. I’d leave enough in my account to cover my interest payments on your loan, of course.”

Norbit nodded. “We’ll have to wait till this large check clears,” he warned me, but it was just routine. He thought I was a real operator now.

“I’ll come by and pick up your cashier’s check for the entire amount on Wednesday morning. How’ll that be?”

He nodded again.

On Wednesday morning, when I left for the office it was with an overnight bag in my hand containing the minimum clothing and equipment for a flight to Brazil. That’s where I intended to go to find my caviar, champagne, and slender women. I had a confirmed Pan-American reservation on the one-thirty flight to Rio, made two weeks previously. I’d told Hilda I was going out of town on bank business that afternoon for overnight. When I kissed her goodbye, it was with an overwhelming sense of relief that from now on I’d never have to do it again, never have to pretend again to enjoy her silly ham and cabbage and macaroni casserole.

I worked calmly at the bank until the noon hour. Then I cashed a check on my account there that nearly cleaned it out, just for current expenses. Chicken feed to hold me until my cashier’s check was comfortably cashed in Brazil.

I went out to the Farmer’s Bank, picked up my cashier’s check, stowed it in my wallet, and left, thanking Mr. Norbit politely. I now had parlayed a small piece of engraved paper that didn’t even belong to me into a hundred and sixty thousand dollars’ cash.

I drove to the airport, savoring my triumph, put the car in the parking lot and went into the waiting room. It was one-fifteen.

At one-twenty, they called my flight. I rose from my secluded seat in the waiting room and started for the loading gate.

That’s when I saw Hilda.

She was hurrying toward me from the entrance, a tentative smile on her face and a tall, yellow-eyed man in tow.

She came up to me and said happily, “Chester!” She drew the tall man forward by an arm. “This is my husband, Chester Carstairs,” she introduced us. “And this is Lieutenant Randall from the Detective Bureau, darling.”

My heart sank in my chest like a wobbly duck in a downdraft. “Detective!” was all I could get out.

Hilda nodded brightly. “Lieutenant Randall wants to arrest you, darling,” she said. “Mr. Norbit and I asked him to.”

Randall put a firm hand on my arm. I was stunned, completely at a loss. But one thing was sure: I was done for. I could never explain away the duplicate stock certificates.

In the police car, on the way into town, I said to Lieutenant Randall, “How did Norbit get wise, will you please tell me that?” I felt put upon and indignant.

It was Hilda who answered my question.

“Oh, Mr. Norbit didn’t guess for a minute anything was wrong, Chester. Not until I telephoned him.”

I couldn’t believe it. She was a moron about money. “How did you happen to call Mr. Norbit? You never heard of the man!”

“That’s right, darling. Not until this morning. Not until that funny thing came in the mail.”

“What funny thing?”

“That bank statement, or whatever you call it. From the wrong bank, Chester. Don’t you see?”

Gloomily I reflected that it’s the little routine details that trip you up every time. I’d forgotten about monthly bank statements. Me — a banker. I croaked, “The wrong bank?”

“Of course. You work at the First National, silly. I know that much. And our only bank account has been there, naturally. But this morning you got a statement from the Farmer’s Bank. I thought it was a mistake, so I opened it. And you know what, darling? It showed that a Chester Carstairs at our address had more than a hundred and sixty thousand dollars in an account there!” Hilda gulped. “I knew very well you couldn’t have as much money as that! You’re always telling me I have to skimp. So I was sure it was a mistake. I just simply called the Farmer’s Bank and told them so.”

“And you talked to Mr. Norbit, I suppose?”

“Why, yes, and he was very nice. When I told him who I was, he said, ‘Oh, the lady whose Intercontinental stock we’re holding as security for some loan we made your husband.’ ”

“And then you told him it couldn’t be your stock, because it had burned up and you’d just received a new certificate?”

“Well, I didn’t understand why he wanted to know, but I couldn’t just politely refuse to tell him, could I?”

“No, I suppose not,” I said wearily.

“Especially,” Hilda went on, “when he told me you were probably leaving the country right that minute with my money and his too, and not even taking me with you!”

In a weary, injured tone I said, “And you believed him? You’d really think that—”

“I thought it was a possibility, Chester,” she said defensively, “because one of the cancelled checks that came with that bank statement this morning was made out to Pan-American Airways. And it seemed like a lot too much money to pay for the little short trip you’d told me you were taking today. So when I told Mr. Norbit about that—”

“That’s enough, Hilda,” I said. “Don’t go on.” I lapsed into miserable silence. Lieutenant Randall looked at me and grinned.

“Smart girl,” he said, jerking his head toward Hilda.

Hilda was crying now.

“I didn’t want you to leave me, Chester,” she wailed. “I love you — you know that.”

“So you betrayed me to the police?”

Hilda sniffed.

“Yes,” she said solemnly. “This won’t make any difference to me, Chester, I promise you. When you come out of prison, I’ll be waiting for you.”

I sighed and closed my eyes. Sadly I said farewell forever to my dream of caviar, champagne, and slender girls. For me there would never be anything but ham and cabbage, macaroni casserole, and Hilda. If or when I ever get out.

Copyright © 1966 by LeMarg Publishing Corp.